Democracy in India: A farce?

Hi All,

I write this post with great disappointment and an even greater wrath at our elected representatives. An entire session of Parliament has been washed out due to the utterly reprehensible and irresponsible attitude of the ‘honorable members of parliament’. The session concluded with not much business done and the bitter acrimony between the government of the day and the opposition is showing no signs of abating.

Slowly but steadily, my confidence in our democracy is diminishing. This is how the scenario looks as of now: We have MPs who don’t even bother to be present during the session. There are some who will only ask questions in the House when they are ‘paid to do so’ [Cash for questions scam]. For a whole chunk of them, the quantum of money paid is the only consideration for voting on a certain bill. Barring a few exemplary members, almost of all of them love converging on the well of the house to chant slogans and disrupt proceedings. I pretty sure I have missed out at some of the negative traits of our MPs [as it’s a never ending list] but the above instances should suffice to show the state of despair of democracy in our country.

We can keep on with the chest beating that we are the world’s largest democracy. Mr. Obama might say we are a beacon for many nations in the world. We can go on with the humongous carnival of over 600million people exercising their franchise every 5 years. But we must ask ourselves, what does it mean to the poor labourer who is unsure of his livelihood? What does it mean to the farmer who sees no end to his misery? Democracy must work for these people for it to be proclaimed as a mechanism of support and redressal of grievances.

Needless to say, democracy has worked the world over. It has forced society to listen to the voices of the poor and downtrodden, share their burden and more importantly ensure their social and economic uplift. Unfortunately the same concept doesn’t seem to be reaping the desired benefits in our country. The question here is why isn’t democracy delivering for us? Is it really a problem with the system? Where have we gone wrong and what do we need to do to put the house (pun intended) in order. As usual, we find ourselves in a situation where we have more questions than answers.

P.S. Apologies for a rather somber post during the holiday season. But just thought that it might be good to discuss this. Happy New Year 2011 to one and all...

Inner party democracy, anyone?

Hi all,

We always pride ourselves with the fact that we are the world's largest democracy. Every five years when we go out to vote, we leave the rest of the world in awe. We make them wonder how such a staggering exercise is being conducted without major hiccups. The statistics alone is sufficient to rattle any planner and put him/her out of sleep for days.

For all the chest beating that we indulge in, there is a darker side to our democracy that we usually don't visit that often and would certainly like to keep it under the wraps from prying outsiders' eyes. Probably you would have guessed what I am talking about right now.

Inner party democracy has not been on the agenda of many political parties for a long time. They, conveniently, forget the fact that charity starts at home and that being propagators of democracy also means that they themselves have to practice it both in letter and in spirit first. Most of the political parties today somehow give inner democracy a miss. Dynastic politics seems to be the order of the day. If not that then it is a single strong man whose whims and fancies decide who and how the party is run.

Is this what democracy is all about? We all know it wasn't meant to be this way. Why are our political parties behaving in a manner that can be best described as being devoid of democracy? And whose responsibility is it to put the house under order? Where do we draw the line between democracy and indiscipline? Should academic exercises like writing a book come under the purview of a party's ideology?

p.s. I didn't want to get into the gory details of dynastic politics and strong men who control their parties with an iron grip...we all know it too well don't we...:)